I posted the original Guardian story yesterday
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26825990
but perhaps because of my lousy copyediting of the title it only attracted five upvotes. This follow-up story seems pretty good and the title was not difficult to squeeze under 80 chars.
The story of Facebook treating India's ruling BJP has attracted a fair bit of coverage - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... - but the story suggests FB values good connections with the quasi-fascist ruling party over the risk of yet more damage to its reputation.
I feel like Facebook has realized that if they win in a major market and becomes a monopoly, reputation no longer matters as they are dominant anyway. This is perhaps the logic behind nonintervention.
"I want them to understand socialism with Chinese characteristics."
"I want" to an employee of Facebook from Zuckerberg might as well be an order. Whether that was said to the colleagues is another matter. Zuckerberg may well have been just sucking up to the Chinese.
With this finally being mentioned, it also needs to be said that they are quite enthusiastic about mowing down Congress on FB, and IG.
And that very much unlike other far more on the fringe parties. This was going on for far longer before Facebook's political engagement became known in the West.
It feels to me, Zuckerberg wants INC dead, and buried.
Wouldn't be against that myself. INC, is for all reasons, synonymic with corruption. But this will leave BJP with no counter whatsoever besides regional parties.
I dislike BJP propaganda as much as next educated person, but could it be just that if facebook stops sensoring BJP bots, they might provoke mobs to physically attack Facebook in India, and their employee's safety is important for them?
It seems to me on this topic almost everyone (including myself) is in a completely hypocritical position.
We want facebook to take action in countries where we disagree, but not take action in areas/countries where we agree. Here is a perfect example.
I imagine most people criticising Facebook here were in favour of facebook wiping the hunter biden story from everywhere. Because one is a conservative government, the other is a risk to electing a left wing one.
The other situation china. Most people find it outrageous that Google tried to get into china by building a censoring search engine. Yet expect Google and Facebook to filter disinformation elsewhere that is a threat to their side, or even just articles sceptical of lockdown.
Unfortunately in both cases we can't have both. These are directly conflicting situations, you can have one, but you can't have both.
No, but also useless. You wanting Facebook to die as your primary motive gives your opinion zero, if not negative value as far as decisions on Facebook would go.
The situations are not symmetric because there is a right answer on each side and they give different results. Google should filter information when it's the right thing to do. It should not filter information when it's the wrong thing to do. The superficial symmetry of the two situations is completely irrelevant to which course of action is right and acceptable.
No, the Hunter Biden story was "wiped from everywhere" because it was part illegal (the authentic parts, if they were indeed authentic, would likely have violated revenge porn laws in addition to Facebook's ToS on nudity), part misinformation and part (and this is probably the least important) character assassination. It also wasn't a very successful "wipe" if the story got coverage in various mainstream media. It wasn't a very successful smear campaign because as it turns out, saying "your son may have done an illegal sex thing while on drugs" isn't a very effective smear against someone running against an incumbent who has had credible scandals ticking every one of those boxes himself.
You also need to get out of the headspace where you think Biden is "left wing" just because Trump or Modi is so extremely right wing. If you want to see "left wing" criticism on Facebook it's not about Hunter Biden, it's about things like the ("alleged") Uyghur genocide or the portrayal of socialist governments.
Biden isn't a socialist, he's a centrist moderate leaning towards fiscal conservatism with some moderately progressive social policies. Even relative to the US population he's barely "left wing". His appeal was literally that he plans to "reach across the isle" and "unite" with Republicans (who, for the record, have shown no such interest themselves).
Neither is Facebook, by the way. While Facebook has cracked down on right-wing disinfo campaigns after they gained massive traction after 2016, they've also cracked down hard on socialist accounts and groups, often with no recourse and no clear explanation of which parts of the ToS they allegedly violated. Meanwhile they cozied up to Republican politicians during the Trump era and there have been leaked conversations and memos indicating Zuckerberg & co intentionally pushing for a more right-wing slant to offset the employees' supposed liberal bias.
I'm not in support of Facebook wiping "the Hunter Biden story", I'm in support of Facebook enforcing its ToS. But they need to do so transparently and objectively. They aren't doing that, though, and that's a problem. But it doesn't only impact "the right". The right is just more likely to see their own being banned over bannable offenses like explicitly racist remarks and calls to violence and portray it as "censoring conservatives".
A story about hunter biden is not the same as the material itself, which might have been illegal.
Just like obtaining and publishing Trump's tax returns were illegal, but talking about it isn't, and they most certainly weren't wiped from Facebook and Twitter.
Which is an extremely easy example of just what double standards there were during the election.
Also - how do you know it was illegal? Has a court ruled so? Are you basically expecting Facebook and Twitter to know what and what isn't illegal in real time, and act upon that? To know what a court might rule before there's even been a court case? What your suggesting is ridiculous.
> obtaining and publishing Trump's tax returns were illegal
> how do you know it was illegal? Has a court ruled so? Are you basically expecting Facebook and Twitter to know what and what isn't illegal in real time, and act upon that? To know what a court might rule before there's even been a court case?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
PS: If you don't see the difference between yellow press trying to create a moral panic over a candidate's son engaging in behavior the incumbent has been documented to have engaged in himself, and news sites covering a candidate's tax returns which were leaked after the candidate spent years claiming he wanted to publish them but couldn't for legal reasons, I have nothing to say to you. I don't even like Biden but its pretty clear the most tangible criticism based on the Hunter Biden laptop situation was that the leaked sex tapes were previously used to blackmail the candidate, which clearly ceased to be relevant the instance they were published unless the claim was that this had influenced his actions as a VP, which none of these sites dared to assert.
> If you don't see the difference between yellow press trying to create a moral panic over a candidate's son engaging in behavior the incumbent has been documented to have engaged in himself, and news sites covering a candidate's tax returns which were leaked after the candidate spent years claiming he wanted to publish them but couldn't for legal reasons, I have nothing to say to you.
You should try. Painting an argument as reprehensible to make while giving the impression that argument is simple to counter by people who are not bad or stupider than you is not a good habit.
Is there some premise that people have to share with you in be worth having a discussion with? Is it too much to ask for you to make that premise explicit? Why would you cite the extensive coverage of Trump's every breath and typo as a reason not to cover Hunter Biden? What does a shrug emoticon add?
I don't understand your argument. Biden has been accused of family-related corruption. What do Trump's ultimately completely un-notable taxes (other than the massive tax refund given to him by the Obama administration after the housing derivative bubble burst) have to do with Biden's son?
The Hunter Biden story violated Twitter's ToS doxxing rules at the time, by including his personal email address which was specifically mentioned in the rules. To my knowledge, Trump's tax returns may seem comparably personal but didn't include any of the identifying information to get them flagged.
That was Twitter's justification at least. I think they mishandled the situation terribly, and they somewhat agree by their ToS change after the event.
> Trump's tax returns may seem comparably personal but didn't include any of the identifying information to get them flagged.
Sometimes we think that GPS locations tied to a specific android installation is totalitarianism, sometimes we think that someone's tax returns can be checked by the official flaggers and found not to contain any identifying information.
The Indian leading party has over 3.2 million WhatsApp accounts. These groups are used during Election Day in many states to spread misinformation amongst gullible citizens and change the outcome on the last moment....
I am from India and know Hindi. The person in Video is Mr. Amit Shah. President of BJP and Home Minister of India. At the above timestamp he says (translation): Even if it is sour or sweet, truth or false we could spread it to people because we had created a group of 32 Lac (3.2 Million) people on Whatsapp.
> He said that we have created 32 lakh WhatsApp groups (not people).
Don't lie man. Not cool at all! He said "Woh isliye hopaya ki hum battis lakh WhatsApp ka EK group banakar khade the". Which translates to "it happened because we created a WhatsApp group with 32 lakh people in it". You accuse a political party of spreading misinformation and you do that yourself! Did you seriously think you are the only one who knows Hindi in Hacker News and that you can get away with this lie? There is no need to even "listen carefully". It is as audible as it gets.
32 lakh WhatsApp groups is technically crazy to pull off unless done programmatically. And what is the point of 32 lakh WhatsApp groups? It serves no purpose to have so many groups.
It is alright. Happens to the best of us. Apologies for being harsh. Just sick and tired of seeing leftwing propaganda on Hacker News. Especially against India. Hence created a throwaway account just to protect my identity but still voice my counter. Did not expect you to own up to your mistake. Thanks for doing the right thing. A lot of the international audience here don't know Indian political context and gauge whatever is shown on Western mainstream media to be the reality of things. But when local Indians who know regional language also contribute to that propaganda it pisses me off big time. That is why I was harsh in my comments. Apologize again for being rude.
Did you change your comment from something to do with Trump to this? I chose to ignore your original comment because it did not add value to the discussion at hand. Maybe you have a grudge against Trump that you are trying to insert into a discussion on Indian politics. But at least I did not downvote. By making this edit you just proved my point. The fact that you had to change your own comment shows how it was heavily downvoted by your own peers. There is a very narrow line of thought that is appreciated here on HN. Anything that goes away from that narrow line of thought gets downvoted and flagged. Congratulations on experiencing it firsthand.
> or is this supposed to mean that they created various groups and the total count of all the members is 32 lakh?
I am sure he meant this. But I am more interested in translating what he said verbatim than add/remove meaning from it. What you interpret it as is up to you. But a translator should be true to what the source said and not add/remove from that.
But to actually give more context to the video itself: Amit Shah (the speaker in the video) says that one of the members in the group sent a fake message saying that a local political opponent slapped his father (who is also a politician and an erstwhile Chief Minister). That message spread like wildfire. And many people of that State (where the election was taking place) did not take kindly to that bit of story (slapping your father is the worst thing you can do in an Indian context). So Amit Shah says that even though that message worked to the ruling party's advantage, that should never have been done. He told them (the workers of the party present in the gathering) to not indulge in such activities and instead spread the truth. After that he makes that statement that the message was spread so fast only because they have a group of 32 lakh volunteers/party workers in it who spread the message. Now obviously one group cannot have 32 lakh members. Neither is Amit Shah so tech savvy that he will moderate/admin the groups. I am sure he doesn't even know/have the time to create a WhatsApp group. There is an IT wing that manages the show. So when he says 32 lakh members in a group, you should interpret it as many groups but total count of 32 lakh. Now it definitely isn't 32 lakh groups (that would be crazy and pointless).
So only when you take the entire speech into account will you understand the context in which this was said. But if you cherry pick, you can derive any meaning you like.
Maybe it does. I haven't tested the limits. If we take 3000+ people per group limit, it would be around 1100 groups. Having 1100 groups is pretty realistic possibility considering the number of states in India, regional languages/dialects, overall population and diversity.
I think they know that if they will not tow Ruling party (BJP) line they will lose another billion user market just like China.
It is unfortunate that Modi Government is employing fascist/communist techniques of slowly killing democracy and dissent.
"Whistleblower points to double standard in Facebook’s enforcement of rules against powerful."
Ya think? All of these articles about FB needing to block this or that are really missing the point.
It's really quite simple.
FB doesn't want to be regulated.
The people who might regulate FB like Modi and the BJP.
Therefore FB treats Modi and the BJP better.
There is no universal standard we can apply to content regulation. We like to pretend that FB can somehow implement fairness. They couldn't even if they wanted to. There is no bright line between political advertising and non-political advertising. This entire discourse is facile.
There is no universal set of rules we can apply to FB. FB is always going to act in deference to those who can regulate it and their friends.
On the facts you're dead right but I reject the cynical framing. This is an important story because we want the truth to come out.
It's why, for instance, the first impeachment of Trump was so important, even though you could correctly say there was no chance of success in the Senate. Because of this, safeguarding the integrity of the election becam important to a lot of people, and so Trump was unable to steal the election even with complete dominance over his party and a large, devotedly loyal mass movement behind him.
I rather expected Facebook doing almost nothing, so for me this news is news. I had my experiences reporting blatantly fake accounts or nazi insignia-ridden ones, only to receive the canned answer "it doesn't infringe in our community standards" so my expectations were low to start with...
I'm not on Facebook. I'm on Twitter. All Indian politicians are given special treatment on Twitter. When I flag comments by ordinary users, they get taken down pretty soon. I flagged a few videos of a politician inciting a beheading, but both he, and his videos are on Twitter.
In that respect, Twitter (and Facebook) are no different from Indian law enforcement agencies. One set of rules for nobodies like me, a different set of rules for the "rulers". Ironic, because they are not supposed to be our rulers, but our servants.
They made this pretty explicit for the former president of the US: anybody "newsworthy" (ie. has enough power to hurt the platform) has near free play around the rules.
In contrast my personal opinion is that we should hold people in power to a higher standard.
I don't think content posted by elected officials should be moderated (except maybe in the most extreme cases). The society should have the right too see it and make their own conclusions about it. I bet a quite a few people would have had a better opinion of Trump, if Twitter actually removed his tweets where he made various untruthful and inciteful claims.
quite a few people would have had a better opinion of Trump, if Twitter actually removed his tweets where he made various untruthful
This is a double edged sword. A lot of people will (and do) blindly believe anything their leader (Trump or someone else) says, no matter how stupid/wrong/evil it is. I guess you are assuming people are rational and that people have time/patience to carefully analyze the content they are consuming and separate truth from hysteria. The reality is that most people (left or right, religious or non-religious... doesn't matter) have already made up their minds and simply look for people who think alike, to rationalize the bubble they are in. Which the tech companies and media are happy to serve, as that is where the money is.
It goes beyond newsworthy accounts and into what's in the best interest of the company. When I posted this [0] a couple of months ago if sounded far fetched for many. Facebook (and Twitter) will selectively apply any measure depending on whether it's in their best interest or not. Everything else is usually a rationalization of that outcome.
In the US, political speech (of all types) is usually held to a looser standard (in the sense that it's harder to restrict) - which I think makes sense.
We should hold our elected officials to a higher standard, but we probably do so through the mechanisms built into our laws.
That being said... not all speech by political figures is political speech.
I'd like to say this is related to "one" wing or the other, but it's not. International liberal media like the Guardian have consistently biased reporting where they report hate speech from the Indian pagans, while completely muting out similar messages from adherents of Islam and Christianity.
Worse still the former tend to be simple rabble-rousing, while the latter often have had real consequences. See for instance,
In fact, barring a few indoctrinated people most folk I know are very aware of these biases - many such stories often find uniform coverage in "vernacular" media", and is in fact one of the reasons why, ironically, BJP gets votes.
English speakers of the world, of course, are both pretentious of their own half-baked knowledge, and at the same time, and dangerously, have both the resources and a desperate, almost religious, need to affect change.
No wonder they've destroyed much of the Middle East.
Please don't bother India - you lot have done enough damage already.
> OpIndia is an Indian right-wing news portal founded in 2014 by Rahul Raj and Kumar Kamal. The website has published fake news and anti-Muslim commentary on multiple occasions, including a 2020 incident in which it falsely claimed that a Hindu boy was sacrificed in a Bihar mosque.
> OpIndia is dedicated to criticism of what it considers "liberal media", and to support of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Hindutva ideology. According to University of Maryland researchers, OpIndia has shamed journalists it deems opposed to the BJP, and has alleged media bias against Hindus and the BJP. In 2019, the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) rejected OpIndia's application to be certified as a fact checker. IFCN-certified fact checkers identified 25 fake news stories and 14 misreported stories published by OpIndia from January 2018 to June 2020.
This just isn’t true - Akbaruddin and Asaduddin Owaisi’s speeches against Hindus, Ahmedis and Taslima Nasrin have been covered extensively for example.
Ugh. The BJP are Hindu nationalists that should be labeled as extremists — a bunch of Napoleon-complex-having-authoritarians...
But India is the next big thing so all companies from Apple to Facebook and everyone in between will likely pander to the government.
I’m East Indian but born in America (lucky me I guess) living in Berlin. I mean no disrespect to my fellow Indians just to convey my utter contempt for Modi and his thugs both the BJP and his gestapo the RSS.
> The BJP are Hindu nationalists that should be labeled as extremists
The core root of all the evil in India is the Vedas and its preaching on varna system(modern caste system). BJP is just another by product. Without educating the people on these text books its very hard to find a solution.
They should be labelled as extremists just like many other Islamic organizations in India who have been giving threats to make India an Islamic nation by killing all the Kafirs, right?
Every single political party in Pakistan is an islamic-nationalist party. Yet the Western media never describes them so. Yet the BJP is always suffixed with "hindu-nationalist".
Israel has preferential citizenship for Jews. Yet, somehow India is not allowed to have CAA (per western media).
India is a supposedly secular country, it's stated in the constitution. Pakistan and Israel explicitly aren't.
Also, you are totally wrong about "every single political party in Pakistan being an Islamic-nationalist party." The second biggest party in the Parliament is the Pakistan People's Party, who are secular.
Additionally, Israel gets plenty of criticism in international media for its preferential citizenship laws regarding Jews.
> Every single political party in Pakistan is an islamic-nationalist party. Yet the Western media never describes them so.
Because that is to be expected in an Islamic country. India, on the other hand, is supposed to be a secular nation that prides itself in its diversity.
As for CAA and the like, I feel it's mostly a branding problem. Most of the resistance BJP gets is because their PR people aren't able to present or explain their policies in a civil, rational manner. Every time someone tries to challenge them they go apeshit defensive, declaring them anti-national and whatnot, pissing people of even when they could have had good reasons and people would have probably not reacted to them had they only spoken of them properly.
I like consistency. For consistency's sake, the western media should prefix islamic-nationalist political parties around the world (that would be most political parties in all islamic countries) with "islamic-nationalist".
But perhaps you're not that into consistency, in which case I can empathize why you're okay with the status quo.
Also, please don't generalize. Not everyone is "proud" of india's diversity. I much prefer how the homogeneity of countries like Japan and China has enabled them to quickly progress. I believe i represent the views of a silent majority in india.
> I believe i represent the views of a silent majority in india.
Correct me if I misinterpreted what you've written, but if you think removing diversity is what the "silent majority" wants, boy, are you living in a delusion. You might be trying to make up explanations to forcibly rationalize bigotry. Ethnic and religious diversity is not something you can just turn into "homogeneity" without large-scale genocide. Besides it was never a significant factor in Japan and China's growth relative to India.
Also, just because India is majority Hindu doesn't mean there isn't massive diversity within those populations. India has 22 official languages (and many more which don't have the same level of representation). India will never be ethnically homogenous to the same extent that Japan (a country with two large religions that peacefully coexist) and China are.
I want to respond before you're downvoted to hell.
I certainly agree with you that not everyone's proud of India's diversity. It's been more of an issue lately where we've a separate "Personal Law Boards" for certain religious groups and at the same time we call ourselves secular.
If India has to really become a secular nation, it has to make sure that it treats everybody the same without any specific laws for specific groups.
Does Facebook have lower standards towards politicians or BJP politicians ?
I've seen Facebook and esp. Twitter take an active stance on censorship that goes far beyond banning spam. While this is a cut&dry case, the HN discussion is clearly centered around 'special treatment of those in power' at large.
As I see it, fake news is a good 50-50 mix of actual fake news and a political perspective that is inconvenient to your agenda. This is especially true in India, where politics has always been the business of gangsters and liars. At this point, I'd be surprised if an Indian political rally by any party was less than 50% fake news. (In the sense that twitter censors it). Throwing unsubstantiated accusations towards your opponent is a grand political tradition that dates back thousands of years. To selectively silence one of them is to consciously pick sides.
> “It’s not fair to have one justice system for the rich and important and one for everyone else, but that’s essentially the route that Facebook has carved out,”
I'm not sure if I agree. Either a company as a service and it goes full 1st amendment, allowing any content that isn't illegal. Or, treat it as a profit making machine that optimizes for monetary gain.
___________
I personally lie on the 'Monopoly Social Media platforms' should have hard restrictions on what content they are allowed to moderate. Ads about Nigerian princes are banned, but Ponzi schemes and Goop get to keep advertising to billions.
While I strongly lean left (socially), I find the reporting on Modi from top tier US news organizations to be just as biased and colored with agenda as many of the articles on the other side (fawning over him) that people are asking to be banned.
It is quite hypocritical of left-leaning organizations in the west, to ask for 'objective standards of truth for others', but then turn around and say 'not for us, because we never lie'.
I don't see anything that indicates that she is aligned towards the BJP outside of one weak accusation that got her fired. As I said before, hate speech is the core of politics in India (sad as it is). If FB actually applied is hate speech rules in India, it would have to close shop the next day.
I looked up every post on the 1st page of google, and couldn't find a single 1st source on what she actually did that was fire worthy. There were accusations and supposed hate speech / islamophobia, without any sources given for it.
Her education was at JNU, which is India's left-wing ideological center.
She works at Facebook, whose employees in the US lean socially left.
Her father-in-law is a cabinet minister for one of BJP's biggest political enemies.
Without any priors, I'd say she was more likely to help the left than the right. But, ofc, my speculation is just as unsubstantiated as the rest of the reporting surrounding her.
______
Links to the most credible sources or most clear accusations:
This is the new face of government control of the media. Turns out grassroots support can be faked. And of course, as we know from Amazon, corporations do it too.
Everything Facebook does nowadays is rotten. I don't see how I would trust this company in the future, unless they drastically change their business model.
Why do we expect tech companies to stand up to the people in charge of the countries where they operate?
Is it because we hope and think that tech companies are somehow a new UN of sorts and we get disappointed when they don't live up to their ideals?
I think part of it is that we've all bought into these companies PR departments' promulgation of values and core beliefs. Not realizing that those statements are little more than the ad campaigns that help them sell the most widgets and get the most engagement and hire the most idealistic employees.
How many extra hours a week would you work for the company that professes to "share" your values?
While this definitely does not look good on fb, how is this different than, lets say newspapers and main stream media networks tongue-in-cheek supporting politicians of their preference? Why not have some transparency and fact check on that as well.
The more I read these articles along the line of ‘social media/big tech bad. Real bad’ the more I see it as a turf war for influence between new and old forms of media, with end users/consumers faring worse in both.
85 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadThe story of Facebook treating India's ruling BJP has attracted a fair bit of coverage - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... - but the story suggests FB values good connections with the quasi-fascist ruling party over the risk of yet more damage to its reputation.
Do people need a better example?
He literally orders Facebook employees to read communist propaganda. https://amp.smh.com.au/technology/mark-zuckerberg-snapped-wi...
From the article:
‘"I bought this book [Governance of China, by Xi] for my colleagues as well," Mr Zuckerberg was quoted as telling Mr Lu.’
"I want" to an employee of Facebook from Zuckerberg might as well be an order. Whether that was said to the colleagues is another matter. Zuckerberg may well have been just sucking up to the Chinese.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26777374
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26804791
And that very much unlike other far more on the fringe parties. This was going on for far longer before Facebook's political engagement became known in the West.
It feels to me, Zuckerberg wants INC dead, and buried.
Wouldn't be against that myself. INC, is for all reasons, synonymic with corruption. But this will leave BJP with no counter whatsoever besides regional parties.
This doesn't support the notion that they blocked even more fringe, and radical parties than BJP
https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/27/21536149/ankhi-das-faceb...
We want facebook to take action in countries where we disagree, but not take action in areas/countries where we agree. Here is a perfect example.
I imagine most people criticising Facebook here were in favour of facebook wiping the hunter biden story from everywhere. Because one is a conservative government, the other is a risk to electing a left wing one.
The other situation china. Most people find it outrageous that Google tried to get into china by building a censoring search engine. Yet expect Google and Facebook to filter disinformation elsewhere that is a threat to their side, or even just articles sceptical of lockdown.
Unfortunately in both cases we can't have both. These are directly conflicting situations, you can have one, but you can't have both.
The situations are not symmetric because there is a right answer on each side and they give different results. Google should filter information when it's the right thing to do. It should not filter information when it's the wrong thing to do. The superficial symmetry of the two situations is completely irrelevant to which course of action is right and acceptable.
You also need to get out of the headspace where you think Biden is "left wing" just because Trump or Modi is so extremely right wing. If you want to see "left wing" criticism on Facebook it's not about Hunter Biden, it's about things like the ("alleged") Uyghur genocide or the portrayal of socialist governments.
Biden isn't a socialist, he's a centrist moderate leaning towards fiscal conservatism with some moderately progressive social policies. Even relative to the US population he's barely "left wing". His appeal was literally that he plans to "reach across the isle" and "unite" with Republicans (who, for the record, have shown no such interest themselves).
Neither is Facebook, by the way. While Facebook has cracked down on right-wing disinfo campaigns after they gained massive traction after 2016, they've also cracked down hard on socialist accounts and groups, often with no recourse and no clear explanation of which parts of the ToS they allegedly violated. Meanwhile they cozied up to Republican politicians during the Trump era and there have been leaked conversations and memos indicating Zuckerberg & co intentionally pushing for a more right-wing slant to offset the employees' supposed liberal bias.
I'm not in support of Facebook wiping "the Hunter Biden story", I'm in support of Facebook enforcing its ToS. But they need to do so transparently and objectively. They aren't doing that, though, and that's a problem. But it doesn't only impact "the right". The right is just more likely to see their own being banned over bannable offenses like explicitly racist remarks and calls to violence and portray it as "censoring conservatives".
Just like obtaining and publishing Trump's tax returns were illegal, but talking about it isn't, and they most certainly weren't wiped from Facebook and Twitter.
Which is an extremely easy example of just what double standards there were during the election.
Also - how do you know it was illegal? Has a court ruled so? Are you basically expecting Facebook and Twitter to know what and what isn't illegal in real time, and act upon that? To know what a court might rule before there's even been a court case? What your suggesting is ridiculous.
> how do you know it was illegal? Has a court ruled so? Are you basically expecting Facebook and Twitter to know what and what isn't illegal in real time, and act upon that? To know what a court might rule before there's even been a court case?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
PS: If you don't see the difference between yellow press trying to create a moral panic over a candidate's son engaging in behavior the incumbent has been documented to have engaged in himself, and news sites covering a candidate's tax returns which were leaked after the candidate spent years claiming he wanted to publish them but couldn't for legal reasons, I have nothing to say to you. I don't even like Biden but its pretty clear the most tangible criticism based on the Hunter Biden laptop situation was that the leaked sex tapes were previously used to blackmail the candidate, which clearly ceased to be relevant the instance they were published unless the claim was that this had influenced his actions as a VP, which none of these sites dared to assert.
You should try. Painting an argument as reprehensible to make while giving the impression that argument is simple to counter by people who are not bad or stupider than you is not a good habit.
Is there some premise that people have to share with you in be worth having a discussion with? Is it too much to ask for you to make that premise explicit? Why would you cite the extensive coverage of Trump's every breath and typo as a reason not to cover Hunter Biden? What does a shrug emoticon add?
I don't understand your argument. Biden has been accused of family-related corruption. What do Trump's ultimately completely un-notable taxes (other than the massive tax refund given to him by the Obama administration after the housing derivative bubble burst) have to do with Biden's son?
That was Twitter's justification at least. I think they mishandled the situation terribly, and they somewhat agree by their ToS change after the event.
Sometimes we think that GPS locations tied to a specific android installation is totalitarianism, sometimes we think that someone's tax returns can be checked by the official flaggers and found not to contain any identifying information.
https://youtu.be/1OW7AQxpf2g
(Edit: it’s in Hindi)
He indeed said that they created a WhatsApp account with 32 lakh people in it...
Hence the translation above is correct.
Don't lie man. Not cool at all! He said "Woh isliye hopaya ki hum battis lakh WhatsApp ka EK group banakar khade the". Which translates to "it happened because we created a WhatsApp group with 32 lakh people in it". You accuse a political party of spreading misinformation and you do that yourself! Did you seriously think you are the only one who knows Hindi in Hacker News and that you can get away with this lie? There is no need to even "listen carefully". It is as audible as it gets.
32 lakh WhatsApp groups is technically crazy to pull off unless done programmatically. And what is the point of 32 lakh WhatsApp groups? It serves no purpose to have so many groups.
"Everyone I don't like is a leftist"
Did you change your comment from something to do with Trump to this? I chose to ignore your original comment because it did not add value to the discussion at hand. Maybe you have a grudge against Trump that you are trying to insert into a discussion on Indian politics. But at least I did not downvote. By making this edit you just proved my point. The fact that you had to change your own comment shows how it was heavily downvoted by your own peers. There is a very narrow line of thought that is appreciated here on HN. Anything that goes away from that narrow line of thought gets downvoted and flagged. Congratulations on experiencing it firsthand.
I am sure he meant this. But I am more interested in translating what he said verbatim than add/remove meaning from it. What you interpret it as is up to you. But a translator should be true to what the source said and not add/remove from that.
But to actually give more context to the video itself: Amit Shah (the speaker in the video) says that one of the members in the group sent a fake message saying that a local political opponent slapped his father (who is also a politician and an erstwhile Chief Minister). That message spread like wildfire. And many people of that State (where the election was taking place) did not take kindly to that bit of story (slapping your father is the worst thing you can do in an Indian context). So Amit Shah says that even though that message worked to the ruling party's advantage, that should never have been done. He told them (the workers of the party present in the gathering) to not indulge in such activities and instead spread the truth. After that he makes that statement that the message was spread so fast only because they have a group of 32 lakh volunteers/party workers in it who spread the message. Now obviously one group cannot have 32 lakh members. Neither is Amit Shah so tech savvy that he will moderate/admin the groups. I am sure he doesn't even know/have the time to create a WhatsApp group. There is an IT wing that manages the show. So when he says 32 lakh members in a group, you should interpret it as many groups but total count of 32 lakh. Now it definitely isn't 32 lakh groups (that would be crazy and pointless).
So only when you take the entire speech into account will you understand the context in which this was said. But if you cherry pick, you can derive any meaning you like.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments
Ya think? All of these articles about FB needing to block this or that are really missing the point.
It's really quite simple.
FB doesn't want to be regulated. The people who might regulate FB like Modi and the BJP. Therefore FB treats Modi and the BJP better.
There is no universal standard we can apply to content regulation. We like to pretend that FB can somehow implement fairness. They couldn't even if they wanted to. There is no bright line between political advertising and non-political advertising. This entire discourse is facile.
There is no universal set of rules we can apply to FB. FB is always going to act in deference to those who can regulate it and their friends.
It's why, for instance, the first impeachment of Trump was so important, even though you could correctly say there was no chance of success in the Senate. Because of this, safeguarding the integrity of the election becam important to a lot of people, and so Trump was unable to steal the election even with complete dominance over his party and a large, devotedly loyal mass movement behind him.
In that respect, Twitter (and Facebook) are no different from Indian law enforcement agencies. One set of rules for nobodies like me, a different set of rules for the "rulers". Ironic, because they are not supposed to be our rulers, but our servants.
In contrast my personal opinion is that we should hold people in power to a higher standard.
This is a double edged sword. A lot of people will (and do) blindly believe anything their leader (Trump or someone else) says, no matter how stupid/wrong/evil it is. I guess you are assuming people are rational and that people have time/patience to carefully analyze the content they are consuming and separate truth from hysteria. The reality is that most people (left or right, religious or non-religious... doesn't matter) have already made up their minds and simply look for people who think alike, to rationalize the bubble they are in. Which the tech companies and media are happy to serve, as that is where the money is.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26195047
> They are removing some fake accounts and not others.
> Some departments are routinely instructed to turn a blind eye to the actions of some but not others
We should hold our elected officials to a higher standard, but we probably do so through the mechanisms built into our laws.
That being said... not all speech by political figures is political speech.
https://twitter.com/DrJK_Murali/status/1381567386587852800?r...
https://www.opindia.com/2021/04/aap-mla-amanatullah-khan-cal...
I'd like to say this is related to "one" wing or the other, but it's not. International liberal media like the Guardian have consistently biased reporting where they report hate speech from the Indian pagans, while completely muting out similar messages from adherents of Islam and Christianity.
Worse still the former tend to be simple rabble-rousing, while the latter often have had real consequences. See for instance,
https://www.opindia.com/2019/10/kamlesh-tiwari-murder-post-m...
In fact, barring a few indoctrinated people most folk I know are very aware of these biases - many such stories often find uniform coverage in "vernacular" media", and is in fact one of the reasons why, ironically, BJP gets votes.
English speakers of the world, of course, are both pretentious of their own half-baked knowledge, and at the same time, and dangerously, have both the resources and a desperate, almost religious, need to affect change.
No wonder they've destroyed much of the Middle East.
Please don't bother India - you lot have done enough damage already.
> OpIndia is dedicated to criticism of what it considers "liberal media", and to support of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Hindutva ideology. According to University of Maryland researchers, OpIndia has shamed journalists it deems opposed to the BJP, and has alleged media bias against Hindus and the BJP. In 2019, the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) rejected OpIndia's application to be certified as a fact checker. IFCN-certified fact checkers identified 25 fake news stories and 14 misreported stories published by OpIndia from January 2018 to June 2020.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpIndia
But India is the next big thing so all companies from Apple to Facebook and everyone in between will likely pander to the government.
I’m East Indian but born in America (lucky me I guess) living in Berlin. I mean no disrespect to my fellow Indians just to convey my utter contempt for Modi and his thugs both the BJP and his gestapo the RSS.
The core root of all the evil in India is the Vedas and its preaching on varna system(modern caste system). BJP is just another by product. Without educating the people on these text books its very hard to find a solution.
Israel has preferential citizenship for Jews. Yet, somehow India is not allowed to have CAA (per western media).
Double standards, I suppose.
Also, you are totally wrong about "every single political party in Pakistan being an Islamic-nationalist party." The second biggest party in the Parliament is the Pakistan People's Party, who are secular.
Additionally, Israel gets plenty of criticism in international media for its preferential citizenship laws regarding Jews.
Because that is to be expected in an Islamic country. India, on the other hand, is supposed to be a secular nation that prides itself in its diversity.
As for CAA and the like, I feel it's mostly a branding problem. Most of the resistance BJP gets is because their PR people aren't able to present or explain their policies in a civil, rational manner. Every time someone tries to challenge them they go apeshit defensive, declaring them anti-national and whatnot, pissing people of even when they could have had good reasons and people would have probably not reacted to them had they only spoken of them properly.
But perhaps you're not that into consistency, in which case I can empathize why you're okay with the status quo.
Also, please don't generalize. Not everyone is "proud" of india's diversity. I much prefer how the homogeneity of countries like Japan and China has enabled them to quickly progress. I believe i represent the views of a silent majority in india.
Correct me if I misinterpreted what you've written, but if you think removing diversity is what the "silent majority" wants, boy, are you living in a delusion. You might be trying to make up explanations to forcibly rationalize bigotry. Ethnic and religious diversity is not something you can just turn into "homogeneity" without large-scale genocide. Besides it was never a significant factor in Japan and China's growth relative to India.
I certainly agree with you that not everyone's proud of India's diversity. It's been more of an issue lately where we've a separate "Personal Law Boards" for certain religious groups and at the same time we call ourselves secular.
If India has to really become a secular nation, it has to make sure that it treats everybody the same without any specific laws for specific groups.
I've seen Facebook and esp. Twitter take an active stance on censorship that goes far beyond banning spam. While this is a cut&dry case, the HN discussion is clearly centered around 'special treatment of those in power' at large.
As I see it, fake news is a good 50-50 mix of actual fake news and a political perspective that is inconvenient to your agenda. This is especially true in India, where politics has always been the business of gangsters and liars. At this point, I'd be surprised if an Indian political rally by any party was less than 50% fake news. (In the sense that twitter censors it). Throwing unsubstantiated accusations towards your opponent is a grand political tradition that dates back thousands of years. To selectively silence one of them is to consciously pick sides.
> “It’s not fair to have one justice system for the rich and important and one for everyone else, but that’s essentially the route that Facebook has carved out,”
I'm not sure if I agree. Either a company as a service and it goes full 1st amendment, allowing any content that isn't illegal. Or, treat it as a profit making machine that optimizes for monetary gain.
___________
I personally lie on the 'Monopoly Social Media platforms' should have hard restrictions on what content they are allowed to moderate. Ads about Nigerian princes are banned, but Ponzi schemes and Goop get to keep advertising to billions.
While I strongly lean left (socially), I find the reporting on Modi from top tier US news organizations to be just as biased and colored with agenda as many of the articles on the other side (fawning over him) that people are asking to be banned.
It is quite hypocritical of left-leaning organizations in the west, to ask for 'objective standards of truth for others', but then turn around and say 'not for us, because we never lie'.
I looked up every post on the 1st page of google, and couldn't find a single 1st source on what she actually did that was fire worthy. There were accusations and supposed hate speech / islamophobia, without any sources given for it.
Her education was at JNU, which is India's left-wing ideological center. She works at Facebook, whose employees in the US lean socially left. Her father-in-law is a cabinet minister for one of BJP's biggest political enemies.
Without any priors, I'd say she was more likely to help the left than the right. But, ofc, my speculation is just as unsubstantiated as the rest of the reporting surrounding her.
______
Links to the most credible sources or most clear accusations:
[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EgzGUTcUcAA4FGW?format=jpg&name=...
[2] https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/facebook-hate-speech-india-...
Life isn't fair
Is it because we hope and think that tech companies are somehow a new UN of sorts and we get disappointed when they don't live up to their ideals?
I think part of it is that we've all bought into these companies PR departments' promulgation of values and core beliefs. Not realizing that those statements are little more than the ad campaigns that help them sell the most widgets and get the most engagement and hire the most idealistic employees.
How many extra hours a week would you work for the company that professes to "share" your values?
The more I read these articles along the line of ‘social media/big tech bad. Real bad’ the more I see it as a turf war for influence between new and old forms of media, with end users/consumers faring worse in both.